QdQFront v1.3

(03/12/97)



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Introduction

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If you are going to be using QdQFront then you should already be 

familiar with Anthony Bailey's ReMaic and Uwe Girlich's LMPC. You may 

also be familiar with Stefan Schwoon's DemTool, Yonatan Donner's 

AutoCam and my own AutoMAP.



Because of this, I will not try to explain the process involved in 

decompiling and re-recording Quake demos. I will just explain how to 

use QdQFront.



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Installation

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Just put QdQFront.EXE in a directory and run it. The most logical 

place would probably be in a directory with the other QDQ tools.



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Description

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QdQFront is nothing more than a glamorised batch file writer. It is 

designed to offer an intuitive interface both for people who have 

experience of refilming demos and those who are just learning the 

process.



You use a simple, methodical interface to tell it where various files 

are, and which files should be created by the various QDQ tools, and 

QdQFront will automatically create the correct batch file.



It will create a batch file for any of the tools or any combination of 

them. If you want, it will even launch Quake and play the demo that 

you've created. In theory, it will allow you to completely refilm a 

demo without ever leaving the safety of your Windows desktop.



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How it works

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The options and file locations for each of the demo tools are set out 

on separate pages of the main dialog. To access the settings for a 

particular tool, simply click on its named tab at the top of the 

dialog. The pages for some of the tools also have a "More" button that 

you can click on to access a further page of options.



To set the location of a file that a tool should read or write, type 

the path and filename in the appropriate text box. You may also click 

the "Browse" button at the side of the text box to determine the 

location of the file using a standard file dialog.



To set / unset any option, simply click on it to toggle its state. 

Some options effect whether or not the content of a text box will be 

used. If a text box will not be used, it will be disabled.



Some options allow you to select one setting from a selection of 

several. You do this by clicking on the option that you wish to 

select.



When you have set all of the options for the tools that you are using, 

go to the "Filming" page. You tell QdQFront which tools you are using 

by selecting them and deselecting the others. You may also specify the 

name of the batch file that should be written, whether or not Quake 

should be launched, and any additional parameters that should be 

passed to Quake. (Please note that you do not need to use the 

"+playdemo" parameter when launching Quake. This is done 

automatically.)



The final step of the process is to click the "GO!" button on the 

"Filming" page. This will run the batch file. If you want to see the 

batch file before it is run then click on the "Preview" button.



When QdQFront launches a batch file, it becomes a separate task. This 

means that you can then go back to QdQFront, create a new 

configuration, and launch a new batch file. This is useful if you want 

to leave several demos compiling while you are away from your 

computer. You can launch as many batch files as your system's 

resources will allow.



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Version changes and bug fixes

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v1.3



Added the option of inserting additional commands into the batch file 

at every step of the process. Click on the "Advanced" button on the 

"Filming" page. You can then set which additional commands will be 

used and you can either write them in the edit boxes or click on the 

"Edit" buttons to bring up a dedicated editing window. You can also 

import files through the editing window.



Added a new page - "Options". The only option at the moment is "Use 

intelligent field completion". With this selected, QdQFront will try 

to update related fields on all pages when just one is changed. For 

instance, changing the output LS file on the LMPC page will 

automatically update the input LS files on the AutoCam and ReMaic 

pages, and changing the input ACM file on the AutoCam page will 

automatically change the output ACM file on the AutoMAP page.



Added an option to the LMPC page to decompile demos using DemTool. You 

still set the input and output files on the LMPC page but DemTool will 

be used instead of LMPC when the batch file is written.



Added "Read and write same file" option to the DemTool page. If this 

option is selected, DemTool will read the input file and write over it 

with the output file.



When calling ReMaic in the batch file, the directory is no longer 

changed to the LMPC directory. Instead, a "ReMaic.cfg" file is created 

in the ReMaic directory containing the location of LMPC.EXE, so ReMaic 

will always know where to find it. This is a better way of achieving 

the same result because it's now much easier to use relative file

locations for ReMaic.



Added a few hot keys here and there and enhanced some parts of the 

interface slightly. Nothing major.



v1.2



Added support for Stefan Schwoon's DemTool.



Added "Use additional parameters" option to the ReMaic page. Useful 

for people that are using customised versions of ReMaic with options 

not in the release version.



Changed the default filenames to "default_input", "default_output", 

etc. Some of the utilities may have crashed when reading and writing 

files of the same name. (Note: you're not really supposed to keep the 

default names!)



Added numerical hot keys (alt+1, alt+2, etc) to the "Browse" buttons 

on all utility pages and dialogs. Also added hot keys to a few 

options. Should make things a bit better (and faster) for all the hot 

key junkies out there.



Changed the name from QDQFront to QdQFront (small "d").



v1.11



The way the batch file was written failed to take account of the fact 

that people use more than one hard drive. Fixed.



Improved some interface stuff. Now, when a text box is disabled, its 

description (and / or "Browse" button) is disabled as well.



On the "Filming" page, when no tools are set to run, all batch file 

functionality is disabled. It didn't make sense to write a batch file 

that wouldn't do anything other than run Quake.



v1.1



The file dialogs for several input files on the AutoCam and ReMaic 

pages would only accept files that already existed, even though they 

would not yet have been created by LMPC or AutoCam. Fixed.



Added the "+playdemo" command to the Quake command line so the demo 

will automatically play when Quake is launched.



When running ReMaic, the directory is changed to the directory where 

LMPC.EXE is located. This is so that ReMaic can use it to recompile 

the demo to DEM format.



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Issues

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If you find that QdQFront will not run on your system, please ensure 

that you have a reliable version of COMCTL32.DLL in your 

Windows\System directory, which is necessary for some elements of 

QdQFront's interface. Some versions of COMCTL32.DLL have 

incompatibility issues and an unreliable version is the most likely 

cause of QdQFront not working (or working erratically).



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Comments / questions / bug reports

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If you would like to make any comments about QdQFront, or there are 

features that you think should be added or improved, then please feel 

free to contact me.



Also contact me if you find any bugs. If you find a bug with the way 

the batch file is written then please send a copy of it.



Andrew Smith

andrew@amorph.demon.co.uk

